COVID-19 has impacted our daily lives in so many ways from going grocery shopping to personal and business travel. This has pushed some countries to think about what happens post-pandemic to protect their citizens from breakouts and manage travel/tourism. One solution to this is a creation of a “COVID-19 vaccine passport”. Currently, there are more cons than pros, and in the end, it will be up to each country as to how they manage this. Below we will discuss more information about what one could entail and the opinions of those implementing one.
First, it’s important to state where this passport is coming from: The Linux Foundation is hosting a project called the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative, to develop open-source software that will help public health authorities fight the coronavirus. That work includes developing the building blocks of code that health officials could use to create vaccine passports.
The Most Recent Country-Wide Implementations:
In late January, Iceland became the first European nation to issue vaccine certificates to citizens who have been inoculated against the novel coronavirus. It will also recognize certificates from other countries, allowing people who’ve gotten a full course of shots to skip quarantine when arriving in the country. “There’s a lot of us who have deep concerns about issues of equity, issues of, obviously, privacy … if you were to implement the [vaccine passport] system,” said Brian Behlendorf, Managing Director of Blockchain, Health Care and Identity at the Linux Foundation, a non-profit that is working on vaccine passport software. Several other countries are moving to follow suit, including Denmark, Sweden and Israel. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has opposed the idea of implementing vaccine passports in Canada, saying it’s fraught with challenges.
How Could the COVID-19 Vaccine Passport work?:
Behlendorf said a digital vaccine passport could live on a person’s smartphone, perhaps sitting in a digital wallet as opposed to being hosted on a remote server. A person could then present their passport when crossing borders or boarding a flight, for example.
Another suggested method of this would be: In real-world applications, should an individual go to a workplace, festival, or airport, they would open up a mobile app that has the IBM Digital Health Pass built in. Healthcare PII is not stored centrally on the app or available to just anyone to view. Instead, according to Day, a QR code could be displayed in the app which is then presented to a verifier. This QR code is then scanned to see if the person’s credentials match the requirements of the verifier — such as whether or not they have had a recent COVID-19 test or are vaccinated.
Criticisms:
Efficacy of passport: The main scientific issues are around how long immunity lasts and whether vaccines will protect against new variants. It’s difficult to say how long a vaccine passport should be valid for if it’s not known how long the protection conferred by the jabs hang around for.
Equity: Alison Thompson, a bioethicist and associate professor at the University of Toronto, says that even though vaccine passports may seem inevitable, society should still be having a “serious” conversation about their implementation. “Really what we’re talking about here is allowing people with passports rights and privileges that won’t be available to the people who don’t have a vaccine passport, and given that there are huge inequities in access to vaccines globally, and even within Canada, you know, this raises all kinds of concerns about whether this is going to be fair — not just whether it’ll be confidential information.”
Returning to work/life events: One possible outcome of implementing vaccine passports is that people who have them could be exploited to do jobs that need to be done in the public sphere, while those without the passports could be barred from employment.
- “What would it be used for – getting a job or attending a football match or buying milk?”
- “What if we start barring people from essential goods and services?”
- There is a risk of unjustly discriminating in hiring, attending events, insurance, housing applications.
If a passport scheme was rolled out before everyone in the country has been offered a jab, this could unfairly disadvantage young people or people living in certain parts of the country.
If employers implement “no jab, no job” policies – where the requirement to be vaccinated is written into workers’ contracts – equality laws would need to be balanced with legal duties of care.
Data integrity: what kind of personal health information could be collected and shared through digital vaccine passports. How would this be protected from ransomware?
Pros:
The technology, if more widely adopted, could also apply to everything from sports venues to nightclubs and airports. Blockchain technologies are digital ledgers that can be used to facilitate transactions, with information stored in multiple nodes that make it difficult to tamper with data. In IBM’s solution, a form of blockchain is used to manage communication channels between a wallet holding health-related credentials, issuers, and verifiers.
Individuals own a wallet that facilitates access to their health-related credentials, which could include vaccination records, rapid test results, or other forms of PII.
In conclusion
With all the uncertainties regarding how this passport could be developed and used, there are numerous legal and ethical measures that will need to be evaluated if anything like a COVID-19 passport were to be created. It will be a while before any of this technology becomes widely disbursed, but it is important to consider that electronic health data is becoming a way of the future.
Footnotes